CauseScience Friday, March 6th! #selfie #TGIF #science

crestwind24– Today I am doing a bunch of VERY serious molecular biology (as you can see from my picture)!! I am extracting DNA from C. elegans and genotyping them for a transgene that I hopefully added to their genome. In short, I performed an experiment to add my DNA of interest to the DNA of the worms, and now I need to check for worms where the addition of my DNA of interest worked. Cross your fingers for me! Maybe this serious face will change to a smiling face by the end of the day!!

pgurel– Today I’m preparing grids for cryo EM. I’m troubleshooting some problems (as I mentioned previously, I’m trying to develop a new method), and the first step of preparing grids is to make sure they are extra clean. One step I take is to clean grids using a glow-discharge plasma treatment. This is basically a fancy way to try and remove all impurities or contaminants from the grid surface. For highly sensitive techniques like cryo EM, even very small impurities (smaller than a speck of dust) can ruin the experiment, so it’s incredibly important to make sure grid surfaces are clean! Here I am with the plasma cleaner!